The Great American Read--The Book of Books

by PBS

  The cover of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, the first book in the Harry Potter series.

  Author J. K. Rowling at the premiere of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, in 2016 in London. The movie is a prequel to the movie series based on Rowling’s books.

  This sketch by Rowling shows the layout of Hogwart’s School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

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  HARRY POTTER SERIES

  J. K. Rowling · 1997–2007

  The next time you’re stuck on a bus or similarly inconvenienced by transportation, remember this: J. K. Rowling used four hours on a delayed train to London to conceive of one of the most indelible characters in the entire literary canon—a bespectacled orphan boy, with messy black hair, green eyes, and a scar shaped like a lightning bolt on his forehead, named Harry Potter.

  As Rowling recalled later, she didn’t have a pen, so she just sat and thought about the life of this boy who “simply fell into my head.” She started writing that night. Over the next five years, she finished the manuscript, outlined the rest of the book series, secured an agent, and found a publisher. In 1997, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was released, thereby kicking off the bestselling book series of all time, with some 500 million copies sold. (In America, the first volume was retitled Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.)

  On his 11th birthday, Harry Potter is surprised to learn he’s been granted admission to the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry on account of his heretofore-unknown magical abilities. Less happily, he discovers he’s destined to do battle with Lord Voldemort, “the most dangerous Dark wizard of all time,” who seeks to establish the dominance of wizards and witches over nonmagical people, or muggles. At Hogwarts, Harry develops intense friendships with the clever Hermione Granger and the likable Ron Weasley, and he is mentored and protected by the wise and honorable headmaster, Albus Dumbledore. He grows increasingly comfortable with his power as well as his destiny.

  The series offers a master class in meticulous plotting, such that its final climax is foreshadowed in various ways throughout. The books grow longer and more complex as the characters grow older and Rowling builds out her fictional universe. Inventive details abound: All first-years at Hogwarts, for example, must wear the Sorting Hat, which reads their thoughts and determines which house they’ll be in. A scatterbrained character is given a “Remembrall” that changes color when its owner forgets something. This rich context is seamlessly woven into a story about an orphan who finds friends, defeats his mortal enemy, and becomes a man. Anyone who believes that this series is strictly for kids hasn’t been hit by its magic.

  The publication of the seventh and final book in 2007 was a worldwide cultural phenomenon. Bookstores opened at midnight on publication day for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, throwing parties and encouraging fans to dress up as favorite characters. Copies flew off the shelves faster than an owl carrying an important parcel, at a rate of more than 95 sold per second in the United States in the first 24 hours. Nowadays, Rowling periodically offers social-media updates about the characters. And under the pen name Robert Galbraith, she is currently writing a series of well-regarded mysteries for adults.

  Joanne Rowling was born in 1965 in Gloucestershire, England. She studied French at the University of Exeter, then worked a variety of jobs, including researcher at Amnesty International and English teacher in Portugal. But she always longed to be a writer, composing her first story at age six and first novel at age seven. Her mother died the same year Rowling began writing Harry Potter, and a sense of grief and loss pervades the books, as Harry must come to terms with the absence of his own parents.

  Eight movies based on the books were released between 2001 and 2011. In 2016, the prequel Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, with a script written by Rowling, was released, and more are in development. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, an award-winning play about an adult Harry, based on a story by Rowling, premiered on London’s West End, with a Broadway debut in the works. The books have also inspired theme parks and studio tours around the globe.

  A contemporary classic, the Harry Potter series demonstrates tremendous skill and creativity—and it introduced a generation of readers to the bewitching world of literature.

  A trade paperback cover of Hatchet, originally published in 1987.

  Author Gary Paulsen, photographed at his home in Willow, Alaska. Paulsen has published more than 200 books, mostly for young adults. He’s received three Newbery Awards, including one for Hatchet.

  An image of a hatchet from the 30th-anniversary edition.

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  HATCHET SERIES

  Gary Paulsen · 1987–2003

  Man versus nature” is a fundamental literary motif. From the adventure tale Robinson Crusoe (1719) to the television series Lost, the classic YA novel Lord of the Flies (1954) to the bestselling memoir Wild (2012), the confrontation between individuals and unforgiving environments makes for extremely popular entertainment. Hatchet (1987) and the four books that follow feature a young boy forced to persevere on his own, and their dramatic storytelling have earned them a place within this storied tradition.

  In the first novel of the series, a plane carrying 13-year-old Brian Robeson crashes in a lake somewhere in the Canadian wilderness. Before he left his New York City home for a visit with his father in the north woods, his mother gave Brian a hatchet. Stranded hundreds of miles from civilization, Brian must learn to live in challenging conditions, using that gift and whatever he can fashion from nature itself. Over the course of several solitary weeks, he deals with pests like mosquitoes and skunk as well as more serious threats like wolves and bears, figures out how to hunt and fish, and becomes an adept outdoorsman. After a tornado shifts the wreckage’s position in the lake, he manages to retrieve various items from the plane, including an emergency transmitter. A bush pilot hears the distress call, and Brian is saved.

  Brian goes back to nature in the subsequent books: The River (1991), Brian’s Winter (1996), Brian’s Return (1999), and Brian’s Hunt (2003). The five novels are sometimes referred to collectively as Brian’s Saga—an apt title given the adversities he must endure. He spends 54 days alone in the Yukon in the first book, must help transport a dying government psychologist downriver to safety in the second, copes with the isolation and extremities of winter in the third, experiences the difficulties of being a regular high-school student in the fourth, and befriends a stray dog and makes the decision to essentially abandon civilization in the fifth.

  While Brian’s circumstances are unusual, his struggles, in many ways, are not. Young people often feel isolated and alone, and they seek to discover themselves, separate from their parents, institutions like church or school, and society. Paulsen takes universal coming-of-age experiences and combines them with gripping stories of adventure. He also explores deep-seated American cultural beliefs, like the unbreakable bond that forms between a boy and his dog, or the stifling effects of civilization compared to the freedom of nature. Through hard work and stubborn drive, Brian survives. He teaches himself what he needs to know. He’s even a model of positive thinking, because if he falls prey to despair, he will literally die. In order to survive, he must never stop believing in himself and his capabilities.

  Like Brian, Gary Paulsen learned to exist on his own at a young age. He was born in Minneapolis, in 1939, but at age 14 left home to escape his alcoholic parents. After jobs as varied as television writer and missile tester, he wrote his first book, a series of funny essays about the weapons industry, in 1966. Since then, Paulsen has published more than 200 books, completing a new novel or novella every few months, mostly for young adults. In honor of his contributions to children’s literature, Paulsen has received three Newbery Awards, including one for Hatchet in 1988. The Hatchet series has been praised for its ability to persuade reluctant readers to give books a try, and for its transfixing depiction of how one boy transforms into a man.

  Heart of Darkness firs
t appeared in book form in this English edition, entitled Youth: A Narrative and Two Other Stories, published in 1902.

  Joseph Conrad wrote about his experiences as a sailor on the Congo River in the novella that would become Heart of Darkness.

  The novella was originally published in three parts in Blackwood’s Magazine. Part 1 of 3 appeared in this volume, released February 1899.

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  HEART OF DARKNESS

  Joseph Conrad · 1899

  In 1890, Polish sailor Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski journeyed up the Congo River as a steamboat captain. He witnessed the terrible greed and horrific cruelty of Belgian imperial rule and thoughtfully transcribed his impressions into a diary. Disgusted by his experiences, he resigned his post and returned to England. Nine years later, after anglicizing his pen name to Joseph Conrad, he published a novella based on his time in Africa.

  Heart of Darkness (1899) begins as Charles Marlow waits for a ship to be readied. To pass the time with his new crew, he tells a tale of a previous journey as captain of a riverboat steamer in Africa. He describes his youthful fascination with “a mighty big river… resembling an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country, and its tail lost in the depths of the land.” In the recounting, as young Marlow travels to this river to assume his post, he hears about Kurtz, who runs a very successful ivory-trading post in the interior.

  Marlow endures a series of setbacks and delays. His steamboat is badly damaged under mysterious circumstances. Conflicting reports of Kurtz continue to swirl. The steamboat finally fixed, Marlow journeys to Kurtz’s Inner Station. He meets a man who praises Kurtz’s intellect and influence, but Marlow suspects that Kurtz has gone insane—a belief that gains credence when Marlow encounters the man at last.

  As Marlow moves in physical space, heading deeper inland, he simultaneously moves in inner space, learning more about himself. He tells the story as a flashback, and what he now knows informs his retelling. The journey to find Kurtz is complicated, and Marlow hears increasingly bizarre rumors about what’s happening upriver.

  Even as the novella reviles imperialism, it has been criticized for promoting stereotypes about Africa as a “dark continent.” The Africans who appear in Heart of Darkness are enfeebled, dead, or dying. They are neither individualized nor personalized. Instead, as portrayed by Conrad, Africans are a monolithic group in a primitive place. Racist as Conrad’s views may be, he nevertheless offers a harsh critique of the European exploitation of Africa in the name of development and growth.

  Heart of Darkness received new life when it served as the basis for Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 movie Apocalypse Now, a searing indictment of US involvement in Vietnam. This film offers some of the most impressive scenes in cinematic history, from a helicopter attack on a village scored to Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” to the emergence of a mud-covered Martin Sheen from the steaming water on his way to assassinate Kurtz, played so memorably by Marlon Brando.

  Like his narrator, Marlow, Conrad loved the sea. He left Poland, where he was born in 1857, as an adolescent to become a merchant marine. In time, he joined British ships, learning English in the process. As much as he wanted to be a writer, he felt conflicted about giving up his seafaring life and settling in Britain at age 36. But his 19-year naval career gave him plenty of material. Lord Jim (1900), for example, describes the aftermath of a passenger ship that gets abandoned by its captain and crew; it’s also narrated by Marlow.

  In his later years, Conrad published more overtly political novels, including The Secret Agent (1907) and Under Western Eyes (1911). An undercurrent of cynicism runs through these works, reflecting Conrad’s disillusionment with revolutionary movements and their ability to alleviate suffering. Nevertheless, as in Heart of Darkness, he cautions against the dangers of man. We are one another’s worst enemies.

  The book cover for The Help, originally published in 2009.

  Author Kathryn Stockett photographed at the premiere of Dreamworks’ movie release of The Help in 2011. Stockett drew inspiration for her story from the African American maid who helped raise her.

  Actress Octavia Spencer in 2012, accepting her award for Best Supporting Actress for her role in the movie adaptation of The Help.

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  THE HELP

  Kathryn Stockett · 2009

  One of the most well-known, most widely read books about the American South in recent years, The Help (2009) focuses on a group of African American women who work in white households during the 1960s in Jackson, Mississippi. The book highlights the variety of tensions at play in employee-employer relationships and the domestic sphere in the pre–civil rights era.

  Kathryn Stockett began writing The Help on September 12, 2001. She was living in New York City at the time, working in marketing and magazine publishing. In the aftermath of 9/11, she wasn’t able to get in touch with her family in Mississippi to let them know she was OK; her sadness and homesickness spurred a creative burst inspired by the African American maid who helped raise her. That woman’s voice eventually became the character of Aibileen, one of The Help’s three narrators. For the next five years, Stockett received roughly 60 rejections from literary agents. Ultimately, however, the book found an agent and a publisher, and debuted on the New York Times bestseller list. The Huffington Post called it “the must-read choice of every book club in the country.”

  Coping with the recent loss of her son, the normally reticent Aibileen Clark finds her stoicism starting to crack. Her friend Minny Jackson often speaks her mind, but, as the longtime maid of one particular family, she knows some things are best kept quiet. The novel’s third voice comes from Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan, a young white woman newly graduated from college. To her mother’s chagrin, she’d rather be a journalist than a wife. She becomes obsessed with discovering the fate of Constantine, who worked for her family when Skeeter was a child. She decides to write about the world of maids, to tell their side of the story, despite the dangers. Together, Aibileen, Minny, and Skeeter uncover cruelty and even crime.

  Stockett was born in 1969 in Jackson, Mississippi. As she got older, she realized that the family maid she loved, who so helped her in the aftermath of her parents’ divorce and served, to some degree, as a surrogate mother, was almost a complete mystery. “I never once wondered what she was thinking,” the white Stockett told an interviewer. This lacuna forms a cornerstone of The Help: during the era described in the novel, African American maids often stayed with white employers for years, becoming almost a part of the family. And yet these women frequently experienced such humiliations as being forbidden to use the same bathrooms as the families they lived with and their guests and forbidden from eating at the same table. “The help” were relegated to a distinct underclass, especially in the time of the “separate but equal” doctrine.

  Film director Tate Taylor grew up with Stockett in Jackson, where they went to the same preschool and became best friends, and he encouraged her as she drafted and redrafted her debut. As soon as he read her unpublished manuscript, he knew he wanted to direct it. He did so in 2011, and Octavia Spencer, who starred as Minny Jackson, won a Best Supporting Actress award. The film was also nominated for Best Picture, among other Academy Awards, becoming almost as popular as the novel on which it was based.

  Trying to convince her New York editor to support her project, in the novel Skeeter evokes Mammy from Gone with the Wind (1936): “[E]veryone knows how we white people feel, the glorified Mammy figure who dedicates her whole life to a white family. Margaret Mitchell covered that. But no one ever asked Mammy how she felt about it.” By revealing what goes on inside the home, Skeeter—and Stockett—want to empower those who often get shunted to the side, in literature and in reality.

  Predictive Text

  TECHNOLOGY AND THE REAL, IMAGINED WORLD OF BOOKS

  ALTHOUGH WRITERS rely first and foremost on their imaginations to populate the universes they create, some seem
to have a crystal ball tucked alongside their computers or typewriters, especially when it comes to technology. Authors of fantasy, sci-fi, and speculative fiction, in particular, conceived of many tools and machines we rely on today, including credit cards, nuclear power, mood-enhancing drugs, radar, tablets, and earbuds. It feels almost as if these writers wrote the very world we live in into existence.

  In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979), to take one example, the so-called Babel fish lets users instantly understand whatever language they hear. Contemporary readers might see in this invention a fictive analogue to any one of a number of translation apps available for download on their smartphone. The novel’s narrator calls it “probably the oddest thing in the Universe,” but anyone who’s ever tried to order food or get directions in a foreign land would likely disagree.

  Over the course of his long career, Isaac Asimov undertook many roles: professor of biochemistry, bestselling sci-fi writer, international vice president of Mensa, spokesperson for Radio Shack. Asimov was leery, at first, about appearing in ads for the company, but he allegedly had a change of heart after getting some one-on-one help using its new personal computer and word-processing software. Eventually he said that the TRS-80 model echoed technology he’d dreamed up as part of his Foundation series (1951–1993). His short stories and novels also predicted microwaves, automated coffee machines, and self-driving cars.